Saturday, February 13, 2016

THE NEW LAND - #797

For many, The New Land will be where Jan
Troell’s two-part Swedish immigrant story set in 19th-century America really
starts to take off. In many ways, The Emigrants [review] was
merely preamble to get us here.

Released in 1972, a year after the previous entry, The
New Land picks up the story of the Nilsson family almost immediately
after the final scene in The Emigrants. Karl Oskar (Max von
Sydow) has claimed a patch of riverside Minnesotan land as his own, and he’s
bringing Kristina (Liv Ullman) and the kids, along with his younger brother
Robert (Eddie Axberg), to start transforming it into a home and farm. The work
will be hard, but it ends up being rewarding, and the Nilssons become part of a
growing community of Swedish transplants.

Of course, the more people that come from the old country,
the more the problems previously left behind that start to catch up with them.
Believers in the Orthodox Church, for instance, begin to introduce the same
pressure to believe along accepted lines back into the community worship. The
new arrivals also start to assimilate well, though not always in the best way.
One man takes a Native American as his wife, while also taking on the inherent
racism that white Americans felt toward the “savages.” Troell doesn’t layer it
on too thick, but he definitely sees the irony in the land of the free that
denies freedom to others via the easy adoption of Manifest Destiny.

Much of what we see the Nilssons go through is fairly
standard for this kind of tale. The building of the farm goes as expected, with
the occasional setback, but mostly with positive progress. What sets
The New Land apart is the core relationship between Karl
Oskar and Kristina, who definitely strain at times to maintain harmony as they
grow old together, but who genuinely try to be there for one another. As more
kids keep coming, for instance, Kristina has trouble taking her pregnancies to
term, and there is much to explore in what that means for their union and also
how it tests their faith. Likewise, how that faith changes over time, with the
notion that God helps those who help themselves taking precedence over leaving
things entirely up to His will.

The weird thing about the ongoing additions to the family
being so prominent is that Troell never gives any of the children an identity,
and it’s never quite clear how many there are. They appear only rarely, and are
mostly out of sight throughout The New Land. Troell doesn’t
give the kids much thought or importance, which becomes abundantly clear as we
see the parents aging at much more rapid pace than their progeny. Over a decade
passes in this half of the story, yet none of the kids ever seem to become
teenagers who could help work the land, even as their mother and father become
stooped and frail.

In terms of side characters, Troell is far more interested in
Robert and the dysfunctional fraternal relationship between him and Karl Oskar.
Midway through the first act, shortly after the farm is on its feet, Robert and
his buddy (Pierre Lindstedt) set course for California in search of gold. The
younger man returns some years later, looking worse for wear but boasting much
success--something Karl Oskar has a hard time believing. Through a set of
intriguing flashbacks, Troell shows us the reality of the boy’s journey. These
slices are immediately separated in style from the main narrative. There is a
minimum of audible dialogue in Robert’s story, the director instead choosing to
let music and sound effects take charge of the montage. Rhythmic percussion
sets the pace for quickened storytelling, with the oddness of the audio perhaps
intended to represent the hearing problems Robert suffers due to a beating he
took when he was a farmhand in Sweden. As we discover, the younger brother got
a much harsher dose of wilderness living than Karl Oskar, yet he still can’t
quite prove himself to the elder sibling.

Troell also
uses music to underscore some violent sequences in the film, though to a much
less convincing effect. The Native Americans pushed out of Minnesota tried to
reclaim their land through both legal means and, eventually, force. The
preacher Danjel (Allen Edwall) and his family are attacked and killed, and
Troell enlists composers Bengt Ernryd (the I am Curious...
series) and Georg Oddner to drop a hallucinatory organ dirge on the scene,
which creates an odd, dreamlike effect, calling back to a bad vision Kristina
had about Native men invading her home earlier in The New
Land. The music adds an almost horror-like element to the grisly
murders, even as the performances fail the material. Let’s just say the Swedish
actors don’t make the most of their death scenes.

This
violence is followed by a somewhat plodding final act. The breaking of the
peace casts a shroud of death over everything, and the Nilssons are pushed
along the path to the inevitable. I don’t think Troell intended to juxtapose
the heinous retaliation of the American government toward natives with Kristina’s
ruined health, or to suggest that her illness is the result of bad karma;
rather, it seems he’s intending to convey what a difficult life all the
immigrants had chosen, how the conditions were far from the idyll the fanciful reports
of the infant country conjured in their minds, but yet perhaps worth the struggle
regardless. The whole film yellows from this literary jaundice, looking as ill
as it did in the seasick portions of The Emigrants.

This is
maybe the downside of the chosen dramatic structure. As the goal of the
characters is to merely keep living, the film can only follow them until they
don’t. The movie ends, but it’s a fade out that covers years. Life is nothing
if not anticlimactic. Even so, there is still a sense of accomplishment, and
the feeling of experience shared. Which is basically what we signed up for when
hitting play on The Emigrants and The New
Land, so in that, Jan Troell is very successful.

This disc was provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

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About Me

Author of prose novels and comic books like Cut My Hair, It Girl & the Atomics, You Have Killed Me, and 12 Reasons Why I Love Her. Jamie's most recent novel is the serialized book Bobby Pins and Mary Janes, and his most recent graphic novels are the sci-fi romance A Boy and a Girl with Natalie Nourigat; Madame Frankenstein with Megan Levens; and the weird crime comic Archer Coe & the Thousand Natural Shocks with Dan Christensen. He also co-created Lady Killer with Joëlle Jones.